Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [141]
It was not just parents. There were also children who had to be kept in the dark, as Mavis and Keith Batey were to find. As the 1940s gave way to the 1950s and 60s, their children could not be told the slightest detail of what their parents had done throughout the war. And yet those tiny details could escape in the most surprising ways.
Mavis Batey says, for instance, that even the numerical positioning of each letter within the alphabet became ingrained to an extent that might have raised suspicions. She gives an amusing example: ‘Some years ago, my daughter was working in the Bodleian Library, right down in J Floor. Ten floors down, I said, that’s a long way. And she said “How do you know J is ten floors down?” I changed the subject. Little things like that could give you away.’
There were some, of course, who never strictly left Bletchley, but instead stayed with GC&CS through to its move a few years later to Cheltenham when it became GCHQ. Among them were Hugh Alexander and the widely liked Eric Jones, who went on to become head of GCHQ. For others, the silence of Bletchley had set in so far that they did not think about it any more.
Mimi Gallilee got a job in the news research department of the BBC. Although she enjoyed it, the urge to move on was strong. In the 1960s, Mimi went to America. When she came back, she found an odd and rather disconcerting echo of her old life.
‘When I went for my interview at Bush House – I used to put on my applications that I worked at Bletchley Park, adding in brackets “Foreign Office Evacuated”. One of the people on the board whom I didn’t know, said, “I see you worked at Bletchley Park. What were you doing there?” So I said, “I’m very sorry, I can’t discuss that.”
‘My response to that interview question was a reflex action,’ she says. ‘I hadn’t had time to think what would I say if they asked this. I always put it down openly, but only stating that it was a wartime base for part of the Foreign Office. That man on the board was Hugh Lunghi.’
Lunghi is a very distinguished figure; he was Churchill’s interpreter at the Yalta conference of 1945, and in this capacity met Roosevelt and Stalin. He was also one of the first men into Hitler’s bunker in 1945. It is interesting that when he interviewed Mimi Gallilee, the word Bletchley held such significance. ‘And that was why I got the job at Bush House,’ says Mrs Gallilee. ‘I didn’t know then that the department I was going into was also under the auspices of the Official Secrets Act – that was the World Service.’
Some were even more dedicated to keeping the secret. Frederick Winterbotham’s book on Ultra was published in 1974; Walter Eytan (formerly Ettinghausen; he changed his name a few years after the war when he left England for the Middle East, eventually to become an Israeli diplomat), who had worked in Hut 4, recalled: ‘I was shocked to the point of refusing to read the book when someone showed me a copy, and to this day I feel inhibited if by chance the subject comes up.’1
In later years, especially in the wake of the publication of Winterbotham’s account, Bletchley veterans found themselves frequently bumping into one another. Keith Batey and Oliver Lawn, both senior civil servants by the 1960s, often sat on important government committees together. Meanwhile, Roy Jenkins quite often found himself at functions with people who would say: ‘Were you at the Park?’ Once he met the Hon. Sarah Baring at a glittering party, and there was a moment of amused, complicit acknowledgement. ‘I’d never met him before but he was a lovely man,’ says Sarah Baring. ‘But I knew. I asked him if the initials BP meant anything to him and he laughed and said yes.’
However, those years of enforced silence also created moments of great family upset for some codebreakers. ‘You had forcibly to forget